First contribution to open-source software workshop

at the ARC Festival of Digital Research, Innovation, and Scholarship. 2025-07-15

bit.ly/first-open

What

• Software source (and often development) is public.
• Usually complemented with a reuse-friendly license.

Why

• Transparency, reproducibility, community, ease of working together...
• "More perspectives make better software"
• See also: Turing Institute, Google.

Misc. examples that we bet you've used

• Languages: Python, R, Rust, LaTeX...
• Data analysis: TensorFlow, Pandas, RStudio...
• Reference management: Zotero
• Making papers, slides, etc: Overleaf, Inkscape, GIMP

These slides were made using an open-source tool called Marp.

Today

• Most (but not all) open source projects develop on GitHub.
• Most projects are happy to recieve bug reports and code change requests.
• Most (but not all) have contributor guidelines (either in README.md or a dedicated CONTRIBUTING.md).
• Most (but not all) label issues for newcomers as s.

Plan of action

Break up into small groups or pairs. Find something. Work on it.

Rough outline of the "how"...

1. Find a project and an issue you think you can fix. Looking for the can help.
2. Read their contributor guidelines.
3. Follow the guidelines and submit a pull request to fix the issue.

If a project doesn't have contributor guidelines, a typical workflow is:

1. Fork the project's repository, clone (git clone) your fork onto your laptop.
2. Fix the issue.
3. Commit (git commit) your fix, push to your fork (git push).
4. Open a pull request.

If you don't know what to work on

• Is there any software you actively use that you could contribute to?
• Browse ForGoodFirstIssue.
• We have some helpers who work on open-source projects, they are very willing to help you with their lists of s!
  • The Carpentries: Markdown and HTML teaching material.
  • brainglobe: Python code for neuroinformatics.
  • napari: Python Qt image viewer.
  • matplotlib: Plotting in Python.

Or, if you want an easy first contribution without searching through issues:

• matplotlib issue #30306

End

If you're comfortable, please add a comment to this issue with the URL(s) to any pull requests or issues you've created in this workshop!

Thanks for coming!
Sorry that there wasn't much time!